Sooo…. this happened:
Talk is indeed cheap. Enough talk, let’s get straight to those week four game previews! The comments section is always open for business if you want to share your own opinions, or Twitter is a fun place to start some shit. Dig in!
Hey! In case you were wondering, we still talk about music around here, too. Sometimes. This morning let’s dive into a fascinating two-track EP that emerged over the summer, from the Oakland (CA)-based post-doom/drone crew Daxma.
The band’s name is a homophone (or perhaps simply an alternate spelling) of dakhma, the towers built in Zoroastrian societies as a place to cast dead bodies, where first vultures and other scavengers, and then the sun and other elements, will ultimately cleanse and purify the bones.
Well. Good morning, readers. What a long, strange week it’s been, amirite? Feels like half the teams in the National Football League have flipped completely upside-down at some point during the past month, and like half of those happened just within the past seven days.
In this increasingly unpredictable world, today we bring you our thoughts and observations for all of this weekend’s matchups — and just like in the first two weeks of the season, we’re including the predictions for the year-end results based on our current computations and calculations. Although as you may have noticed, all the injuries and roster moves and … drama!!! … across the entire league has really shaken up those forecasts.
Also as before, we start with the Thursday night game — even though this article is actually being published Sunday morning. But we wouldn’t want to skip over that contest, especially since the Thursday night competitors have been the inspiration for our musical selections each week, and this time around will be no different. But naturally at this point in time we already have seen the final results of that game, and — spoiler alert — that outcome did not exactly conform with our predetermined expectations.
Having said that, it will be fun reflecting on all of these predictions after the conclusion of the season, tracking how they changed over time, and how off-base some of them ultimately turn out to have been. Feel free to share your own opinions about how off-base we are down in the comments section, or just tell us we’re a moron over on the Twit machine.
Welcome to week 2 of the NFL! Except for Thursday Night’s NFC South contest, we’ll dive into all of this week’s match-ups right here.
This is always the time of year for tremendous overreactions. Some team everyone thought would take things to the next level this year, came out looking flat in week one. Another team that was supposed to be in full rebuilding mode and a few years away from any kind of success, put on a surprisingly adequate performance — maybe they almost picked up a win. This acclaimed new offensive coordinator clearly has no game plan and the team is going completely off the rails this season, but that coach that everyone said should have been fired suddenly has the team completely turned around.
But with just a single sixty-minute excursion (or.. up to seventy minutes in a few cases) in the books, there are plenty of story lines still developing, and plenty of season yet to come. Which begs the question, which teams are really poised to surprise everyone, and which ones are truly what we thought they were?
Feel free to say who YOU thought they were in the comments section, or tell us how dumb you thought WE were on the Twitters.
Good afternoon! Taking a break from our recent excursion into the wide world of sports, to bring you this recommendation of some music for you to check out!
Released back in April of this year — and brought to my attention by one of the bands involved right around that same time — Nameless is a six-track split album. There are two new compositions apiece by Talsur (a single-member doom band from Penza, sort of near the Russian-Kazakh border) and Doomcult (a single-member doom band from southern Netherlands); and then the remaining two tracks feature each band covering a previously-released song by the other. Dig it!
Welcome back, folks! As we discussed last week, we’re trying a new experiment in writing about what’s going on in the world of American football. If you missed it, check out part I here and part II here.
We did promise last week we’d be getting back to writing about music very soon as well — and we’ve got a few articles and reviews in the works. Stay tuned for those. But first, it’s almost time (just another 20 minutes or so) for Thursday Night Football to kick off! As a real quick preview of the Sportsball article for the week, we’re going to try presenting just the Thursday night matchup here, to be followed shortly by the rest of the Sunday/Monday participants. Still playing around with the format — we’ll see how it goes.
As always, make fun of our predictions in the comments section, or tell us how stupid our opinions are on Twitter.
Hey there, readers. Yesterday we started a brand-new feature here at Valley of Steel, with a preview of this year’s football season. At least, a preview of the first half of the teams playing this weekend.
Today’s article will cover the second half of the slate of games (plus, as promised, the predictions for this year’s playoff teams and Super Bowl teams — based on all the current data out there, and our super top-secret set of algorithms).
Anyway, again, enjoy — and then feel free to yell at me in the comments below, or tell me I’m an idiot over on Twitter. Hooray, sportsball!
First, a quick warning to regular Valley of Steel readers: today we are introducing, in the words of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, “something completely different.” While our purpose for existing remains sharing the good word about what’s happening in the world of music, this new feature (which is intended to be a semi-regularly recurring segment) revolves around a very different sort of heavy metal; specifically, the gridiron.
In case that still isn’t clear enough, we will be taking some time today (and tomorrow) to analyse the sport known around the world as amerikanischer Fußball, and domestically (here in the home of the National Football League) called simply football. As someone who has been voraciously devouring football news and stats for years, and as someone who already uses the written word as a way of exploring other lifelong passions, it just feels natural for me to experiment with writing about the sport. Sporadically, at least — if you aren’t a sports fan, don’t worry, maybe just skip this article and your regularly scheduled music news and reviews will continue coming your way very soon.
But for everyone else: tonight (Thursday, the 5th of September) will kick off the NFL’s 100th season, and we’ll be presenting you with a brief preview of all thirty-two teams. The previews are divided up into the sixteen match-ups that will be featured between now and Monday night, in case you want to quickly scroll through to find your favorite team. Half of them are included in this article, and the other half will be coming out tomorrow.
The main point here is to look at some of the major stories and trends that could shape each team’s season, rather than predicting the results of each specific game. However, you may also notice that each team has been listed with their current win-loss record (which, of course, is 0-0 for every team as of right now) next to their predicted record over the full season. These predictions are the result of an extensive series of proprietary calculations and data modelling based on the information currently available — but as the season progresses, the overall predictions will be updated based on new data and information, as new Sportsball articles are published. So just for fun, feel free to check back to see how right or wrong the outcomes in today’s preview (including the current expected playoff picture and Super Bowl teams, which will be included in tomorrow’s Part II) turns out to be!
Oh, and one last thing — as a fundamentally music-related website, I couldn’t help sneaking in a few references, albeit oblique ones, into the blurb about tonight’s participating teams. So anyway, please enjoy this preview, and then enjoy this weekend’s games. Feel free to voice your own opinions in the comments below, or argue over on Twitter like the cool kids do.
Each of the past two years, Body Void from beautiful, sunny California has unleashed an album unto the world, which could be called anything BUT beautiful or sunny. Even if you’ve been hiding under a rock this whole time, surely they’ve still managed to catch your attention. But if by some inexplicable means you’ve missed out, please do yourself a favor and check them both out here.
Well, this deteriorating mass called earth and all its awful inhabitants have crept their way around the sun once more, and sure enough, the Golden State trio has graced our ears with another heaping helping of auditory despondence: You Will Know the Fear You Forced Upon Us.
Valley of Steel 